Professional Schools

Dr. Keng Siau introduced artificial intelligence and machine learning into his business curriculum during the spring 2017 semester. The Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Information Systems Management course looks at the latest developments in artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, automation and advanced information technology, and "their effect on our current ways of life and work as well as on economic/business models," says Siau, professor and chair of the business and information technology department. Business managers and executives need to understand and comprehend the impending artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning and automation revolution and its devastating impacts." "We are one of the pioneers in introducing artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics to our MBA students," Siau says.

Like most doctors, I spent four years in medical school learning to treat hundreds of illnesses and help patients manage their health. I spent very little of this time learning how to work with patients when modern medicine runs out of miracles -- and only a few hours, spread over four years, learning to lead end-of-life conversations and deliver bad news. A recent study of medical curricula, published last year in the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, found that the average time dedicated to end-of-life care is 13 hours spread across multiple courses over four years. Medical schools need to teach doctors to do the same.

Neota Logic has extended its law school partnership programme, this time with the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia. The legal AI and expert systems company's most recent outreach venture will see 20 UTS students develop AI applications to improve the delivery of social justice, which in this case centres around working with not-for-profits. Neota also previously teamed up with the Georgetown Law Centre in America to help provide law students with an understanding of expert systems. Artificial Lawyer would be very interested to hear about any efforts by your law school or law firm's training team to develop courses on legal AI.

At Harvard Business School (HBS), MBA students are pondering a future when robots rule the road. David's offered his MBAs two cases on artificial intelligence (or AI) and deep learning, and reckons that many of his colleagues at HBS are bringing robots into the curriculum too: "It's a capability that MBAs need to know about," he says. NYU's Stern School of Business offers courses on basic data handling skills plus programming languages like Python, and an introduction to machine learning. And at MIT Sloan School of Management, MBAs can take electives on AI and robotics at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Labs, says Thomas Roemer, senior lecturer.

Professor Lynda Gratton explains how people should prepare for it. While creativity is thought to be uniquely human, artificial intelligence (AI) is changing what we think we know. IBM's Chef Watson submits recipes based on flavour compound algorithms. "When AI can drive trucks, people might not drive trucks anymore.

For the ability to think creatively and make unlikely connections is one of the qualities thought unlikely to be threatened by intelligent algorithms, alongside emotional intelligence and negotiating skills. Previous class profiles are available on business school websites but, to give one example, London Business School's class of 2017 features 417 students of 68 nationalities, with backgrounds in business, accounting, economics, engineering, law, marketing and IT. For this reason, says Jonathan Trevor of Said Business School (part of the University of Oxford), attending a business school which can draw on expertise from across disciplines could be extremely useful. "The temptation when delivering a course is to make it as simple as possible, to give people a degree of certainty, to tell students what they need to know so they can do well.

The world's top online learning platforms are working with business schools such as Yale SOM and Duke Fuqua, and are offering advanced analytical tools to help them refine and enhance student learning. Edtech platforms and universities are increasingly exploring advanced analytics. INSEAD, the business school, last year launched a mobile learning platform for business, which signed up Accenture and Microsoft. Peter Zemsky, INSEAD's head of innovation, says: "Being a leader in digital management education in general is increasingly important….Especially as business schools are teaching [students] how to adapt to changing technologies."

Arruda discusses how ROSS can be integrated into the work of any firm or practice. Andrew Arruda, whose firm ROSS Intelligence helped build ROSS, the world's first artificially intelligent attorney, on top of IBM Watson. See all Vanderbilt social media at http://social.vanderbilt.edu.

Last Friday at Imperial College Business School in London, a throng of MBA students huddled around professor Njuguna Ndung'u, the former governor of the Central Bank of Kenya. "London is soon expected to become the hub of global fintech," said professor Andrei Kirilenko, director of Imperial's Center for Global Finance and Technology. Since creation in 2011, the San Francisco start-up has funded more than 7 billion in mortgages, personal loans and student loan refinancing, and raised about 1.8 billion in venture capital, attemping to shake up banks in the process. Raghu gives the example of a CJBS MBA graduate exploring blockchain technology to make processing IPOs easier.